


Tag on to Harbinger

by Raynidreams



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:19:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set season 4. Leoben and Kara talk.  This is an additional scene to my earlier fic Harbinger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tag on to Harbinger

**Author's Note:**

> The original story was supposed to be a one shot, but some tidying up of notes has created this scene, however there's no real need to read the first, as this explains it.

The Heavy Raider eased upwards first and then tilted down slightly as it flew along the landing bay until it shot out of Galactica.  Free, the narrow screen strip was filled with ships and stars seemingly fixed within the vast void of space.   
  
"Where do you want to go?" he asked, sitting back from the controls, leaving the ship to keep them moving in a single and as of yet unspecified direction.  He didn't look at her directly, but his eyes traced her outline in the glass's reflection.   
  
She was looking to her side, lost in thought, with the nail of one hand being shorn at by her teeth.   
  
He breathed out when she didn't reply, and leaned back to close his eyes.  It was frakked up how serene he felt in her presence.  How insane.  Then again, he was crazy; it's not something he questioned any longer.  He even acknowledged that perhaps he'd been that way all along, an insane machine made for a world that should make sense but that no longer did to him or anyone.  Adeptly, he stopped his mind from running down that spiralling road and let the quiet take him to an almost dreamlike stasis while he waited her out.   
  
She spoke only when it was clear that he had no intention of doing anything until she did.  "It's on the log that we're going to the basestar.  We're going to see if we can get more answers out of the hybrid," she eventually replied.   
  
He smiled though didn't open his eyes.   
  
"No we arn't.  If you'd have wanted to do that, you'd have just taken a Raptor and gone in person.  Alone.  You wouldn't have put yourself through the issue of requesting to see me.  So it's either me you want to talk to, or,' he gave a pregnant pause, 'you want to go further than a Raptor can take you."   
  
In his mind's eye, he saw how her jaw twitched with irritation.  Smiling slightly, he waited her out again.  He'd learned the hard way on New Caprica to not always push for his own desires.  If she wanted something, she would ask.  He’d also learned that everything had to be on her terms.  That he was powerless for it to be otherwise.   
  
Eventually, the sound of her shifting in her seat reached his ears.  He knew that she was examining him now because even through his lowered lids he could feel the directness of her gaze boring into him.   
  
He opened his eyes.    
  
And out of the blue she stated, "You should have killed me when you had the chance."   
  
"No Kara.  I was scared, and acting out of that fear.  And I doubted the conviction of my actions even before I raised the weapon to you."   
  
"I'm not talking about the after the mutiny.  I'm talking about in the beginning. You should have snapped my neck."   
  
So long ago now.  Even so, the day was still as fresh to him as this moment.    
  
He remembered his instant attraction to her.  The spark that went beyond all reasoning and programming.  He recalled how thoughts of her life played in his mind’s eye.  How he’d felt the tendrils of love igniting within him from merely the aura of this broken and powerful woman.  Then he remembered him tearing his wrists from snapping the cuffs apart.  Her eyes widening in shock.  The table flying aside like nothing.  Shifting upwards, the touch of her warm skin, the strides to take them to the door.  The slam of flesh and squeezing… then the moments alone with her and outside reality.    
  
Air rushing in her face.    
  
Her clasping his hand and that of a child.    
  
Them kissing.   
  
To her threat and him revealing that he had a surprise for her.  That they were going to find Kobol and that it would lead them to Earth.   
  
Though none of these memories were in his face or his body when he replied simply "No," with a smile.   
  
His minimal reply didn’t seem to put her off.  She leaned in towards him with an almost morbid excitement lighting up her features. It was the most animated he'd seen her in a long time.   
  
"Just think about it. If you'd have killed me when you had the chance, then maybe your side might have won."   
  
He didn't blink at her point, for it was a thought that he'd had and been called out on many a time in the past. He also didn't interrupt. She spoke so rarely these days that he was reluctant to stop the flow. It brought to mind all those silent afternoons star systems away when, so strung out by the quiet, he’d finally get rewarded for his efforts when she’d rasp monosyllabic replies to his questions.  Then her statements had been about nothing important. Here however, it was an active bearing of the inner most fears of her soul.   
  
"If you'd have killed me, who knows what else might have changed? The missions I planned and pulled off. The shoot-outs... gods, who else would've been dumb enough to go back for the arrow? Not Lee. Not any of them. I..."   
  
"Your death would have screwed up the Admiral and Apollo when they needed to be most on their guard. Your death, as a protector of the fleet would have changed so many things," he added on to her argument for her.    
  
Hearing him state it so levelly, she shivered.   
  
Trying to hide her reaction, she replied boldly; "You cylons could've won."   
  
"Perhaps... yes.  I think we'd have had a much better chance, anyhow.  Strange thing is, I was told by Cavil to kill you, for the stunt you pulled with the Raider. I had orders to do it."   
  
"So why didn't you? Some kind of destiny crap?" she needled, sounding a little more like her old self.   
  
"Frankly yes,’ he paused to hold a finger up.  ‘You always amaze me, Kara, do you know that?  Even though you feel it - sorry, have felt it, you still mock... even after all that wonder you experienced as you beheld your shooting star. After the love that you felt for the universe coursing through you."   
  
And her animation dampened. The nail she'd previously been worrying at came back to her lip.   
  
"Love," she repeated bitterly, then snorted in contempt.   
  
"You told me that I didn't know the meaning of the word. The sad truth is Kara, it's all I know."   
  
Her face opened up in disbelief.   
  
"You've murdered so many people - how can you even dare to say that?"   
  
"I did it for love. For the love and freedom of my brothers and sisters. For the love of God. For the love of humanity and to bring them to Him."   
  
She flared up further. "How frakkin' dare you?"   
  
"Because it's true, no matter how wrong or right, it’s true.  I did it for love.  And don’t you think I know how wrong that is sometimes? But I can't help it, Kara. It's how I was made. How I am. I am bound by love. Bound by it most especially to you!" His sentence finishing much sharper than he’d intended.  He turned away, not happy that she'd gotten to him.   
  
She clicked the knuckles of one hand as a statement of intent.   
  
"You seriously piss me off, all the time.  Some days all I want to do is…”  Her anger lasted for a breath until her look morphed into twisted satisfaction. "Love… and I'll lead you to your end. A great payback there hey, cylon?"   
  
He reached over and grasped her hand tightly.   
  
"Then so be it."  At the way he said it, it sounded like an oath.   
  
"How can you be so passive about it?"   
  
"For the same reason that you are.  The same reason why no matter how dark and how awful your life, you've never put a bullet in your own brain - hope."   
  
"Yeah,' she replied sarcastically, 'cos I've got that in abundance."   
  
He soothed a thumb along her skin until she pulled her hand away with a brusque tug.  He slanted his head down to still hold her gaze.   
  
"Kara, you were born to lie to yourself.  To other men… but not to me."   
  
"Frak you.  So what if I lie all the time?  I do it to everyone… even you,’ she came back curtly.  Then at something in his face, she stumbled on, ‘Some days even the truth tastes like a lie... so much so, I can hardly tell the difference anymore."   
  
He reached out again, but this time to cup her proud chin.   
  
"You have hope.  You've always held onto hope or you would've given in the first time your mother put you in hospital.  The first time the one who was supposed to protect you above all else was the one who broke you.  If you'd have had nothing to cling onto, then you wouldn't be sitting here beside me now."   
  
She wet her lip.  "Who says I even am?"   
  
"I do."   
  
"You?  You almost made me kill myself once.  Remember that?"   
  
He dropped his hand.   
  
"We’re talking truths?  Well here’s one.  I thought that if I gave you time away from hardship and responsibility, then you might see clearly.  I thought in my care that you might have chance to think and be free from all your doubts.  Turns out, I was wrong."   
  
Quietly she commented, "I think that's the first time you've admitted to that particular fact."   
  
He grinned at her reply, not looking sorry at all.   
  
"I was wrong about the outcome only."   
  
Her tongue smacked in an irritated manner… perversely amused in spite of how awful an admission it was.  After a beat she cursed him, "You drive me insane."   
  
His grin only widened.   
  
It went quiet again.  Their ship, still on its straight course had headed past the fleet ships so that now only the glittering, rich blackness of space shone before them.  Leoben's eyes blurred from the light.  From looking into some of the stars so intently that their colours inverted and they looked black on the inside; their power leaving blurry shapes that stayed in his vision even after he shut them.   
  
He couldn’t see it physically, but he knew that one of those systems was playing on her mind.   
  
"So... are you going to tell me where we're going Kara?" he asked, not sounding curious in the slightest.   
  
"Like you don't already know," she retorted.   
  
The hollowness of the suns still marking his eyes, he replied, "I'm interested as to why though?"   
  
She stilled a little.   
  
“Well?”   
  
He made no move to jump the ship.   
  
"Because I think I left in a rush.  Because maybe we missed something.  And maybe if we go back, I might hear the sound again... maybe feel something again to know where..." her words drifted off.   
  
"Going back there will tell you nothing, Kara.  It's a dead world.  Whatever lessons it had to teach were not learned long ago.  The story of the Earth is done."   
  
"You don't know that... maybe we missed something.  You ran... I wasn't thinking... there's too many questions unanswered.  For example, how did I end up there?  I died in a frakkin' planetary storm light years away... it was impossible for me to…"   
  
"I don't have any answers to those questions, Kara.  Only more questions and the phrase that ‘all this has happened before’... Perhaps that was another you.  Maybe it wasn’t.  Perhaps we’ve lived this before and will live this over and over until we get it right; until something changes..."   
  
"I'm not a cylon if that’s what you’re suggesting."   
  
"You're not listening.  It's impossible for me, US to understand everything.  We can only try and make sense of some aspects of what and who we are.  My beliefs about you and I are fluid.  Sometimes I think we've lived these moments before and then other times I know that I stand in one anew.  Such is the connection I feel to things.  Such is the connection that I felt towards you… that is until I saw your dead body." He went quiet and looked uncomfortable for a moment.  Regretful even.  "Maybe what we saw there was a shadow.  Maybe you are the shadow now.  Maybe I am for every time you've killed me and something of what I was, died.  Listen to me, Kara,' he started, suddenly sounding less wistful and more focused, 'I honestly don't know what it is that is happening.  Not anymore.  But that you are at the centre of it is for certain.  And us going back to the Earth will not change a single God damn thing about that.  All I know is that since the mutiny, since holding that gun up to your head, I feel I am back on my path.  My purpose to follow in your footsteps.  And as I said before, all I have is love.  Take that and use it as a wing to fly with, but not back there.”  He appeared so impassioned that she couldn’t fail to be effected.  She sniffed a little, and then rubbed a hand across her eyes.   
  
The lull settled around them again.  It was so still out here that the moment they stopped talking, it seemed absolute.  He filled it with his compassion.  “Kara, I hate to say this to you, but I've come to a conclusion about you... and it's an unpleasant one.  I’ve seen that it's only when threatened with having nothing left, that you really start to fight.  That you know what it is that you want to fight for.  But I don't want you to have nothing left.  So no matter what, you will have this from me always.  And I won’t falter again."   
  
Kara swallowed the lump in her throat, almost wanting to be cruel and to snap his fragile offer in half.  She didn’t and instead remained mute.    
  
He gave her a while longer to sort through her emotions, then started at the controls.  He was prepared to set it for Earth.   
  
“Leoben, stop.  Take us back… back to Galactica," she whispered gruffly.   
  
Nodding, he powered off the FTL prep.  If he was pleased, it didn’t show in his face.  They only thing that did was pity.  "You can cry and let the tears go, you know.  I won’t take them to mean anything,” he suggested softly.   
  
The ship turned around and she leaned back just as he had at the start.  She didn’t sob, but did let them go.  They dripped wetly down her cheeks.  For he was wrong, his words had meant something.  They’d touched her even as though she hated to admit it.


End file.
